May 21, 2020

Thursday, 21 May, Continuation of Chapter One, “Childhood Epiphanies,” >>>>> >A Teacher’s Journey from Southern Methodist University to North Minneapolis: Foundations for Overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools< >>>>> A Memoir >>>>> Gary Marvin Davison

At Memorial High School, students were tracked into K, L, and M mathematics and English classes;  the “L” classes were the regular classes attended by most students, while “M” was for struggling students and “K” were for the advanced.  I remember my classes that were not available at the “K” level as being mainly mediocre and in a few cases good.  Spanish was fine, as were business law, American government, physical science, biology, and chemistry;  both American and world history were mediocre at best.  Even in those latter cases, though, the textbooks were accurate and informational, and the curriculum assumed that the accumulation of factual knowledge was important.  I actually read the chapters as I proverbially answered the proverbial questions at the back of the book (the pedagogical equivalent of today’s filling out packet after packet), rather than just hunting for answers in the manner of most students, then and now.


I had one excellent regular class:  speech and debate;  this I took my senior year and pursued into tournaments.  I learned a lot as a debater about mastering both sides of an issue and once won first place in oratory at a speech contest held at Stephen F. Austin High School.  I was a mighty busy fellow my senior year, inasmuch as I was one of the few who competed in two varsity spring sports---  track and baseball---  and also played on a church basketball team and occasionally participated in a group that gathered for sandlot football.


As I later reflected on on my “K” classes in mathematics, I came to wonder why a well-regarded suburban high school did not offer calculus.  I followed the sequence from algebra I through geometry, algebra II (which I took in summer school so as to position myself to move toward the highest offerings), trigonometry, and ultimately the highest level, pre-calculus courses termed elementary analysis and analytic geometry.  With the exception of algebra II and trigonometry, over which rather mediocre instructors presided, my math classes were typically excellent.


English was also excellent in grades 9, 10, and 11;  they were loaded with Shakespeare, Faulkner, Melville, Thomas Hardy, Greek poets, and such, taught by engaged teachers, two of whom went on to become university professors.  I continued to read quality literature in my senior English class, memorably Dante’s Inferno, but in this class I encountered my first teacher who was unequivocally infected with so-called “progressive” pedagogy.  Although she was intelligent and herself an avid reader, she mostly just had us read without class discussion or teacher comment.  Not believing in grades, this hippy-dippy teacher at each quarterly grading period asked for volunteers who would take “B’s” that could make her grading submissions look legitimate since this was after all an advanced class of student strivers;  the idea was then that we would all end up with “A’s” for the semester.   

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By the beginning of my grade 11 (junior) year, I was reading Time Magazine from cover to cover;  Dad got a subscription as a corporate perk.   I took a keen interest in every subject and was very focused on politics.  I fortuitously had American government my senior year (1968-1969), the November of which featured the 1968 presidential election.  Three categories of experiences connected to my government course were especially memorable:


I did a book report and review of William Buckley’s Up from Liberalism, with which I disagreed but found intriguing, given my debater’s propensity for understanding the oppositional viewpoint. 


The second category arose because of the 1968 presidential election;  we were charged with becoming informed as to electoral matters and candidate policy positions.  I went to see Richard Nixon, who remarkably, given today’s security concerns, appeared in a large park near downtown Houston.  I saw Humbert Humphrey in a much more ballyhooed appearance at the Astrodome, complete with performances by Frank Sinatra (this was before ol’ blue-eyes switched to Republicans) and then-popular daughter Nancy Sinatra.  When I compared Humphrey’s emphasis on civil rights and justice for laborers with what I had heard from Nixon, my enduring propensity to support Democrats as the better option for my evermore leftward leaning self began.


Memorial was a huge high school that for my first two academic years had an enrollment of over 4,000 students;  the new high school of Westchester was built by the beginning of my junior year, so that Memorial’s enrollment dropped to a still-robust 2,500.  In a mock election in autumn 1968, I was only one of 12 students who voted for Humphrey;  the overwhelming majority followed parental leads that would have also found me voting for Nixon, but on this and other political and social issues I was developing a wide positional gap with parents for whom my fervent love did not impede my independence of views.


The third experience from that government class was a research option that induced me to witness a court local trial:  A young African American man was convicted of petty theft, little assisted by a public defender who took me aside and confided his perception of his climate as a “very ignorant man.”  Ignorance, I thought to myself, is the absence of knowledge, and given what I knew about Houston’s wretched inner city schools, I could well believe that the attorney was correct but that his client was the victim of a system that leaves even those who manage to graduate woefully short of the knowledge and skills that they need to thrive in life.


Lamentably, what was true of the schools of Houston is also true, fifty years on, count’em---  fifty years later---    of locally centralized district such as the Minneapolis Public Schools.       


Epiphany, memory, experience, and conviction fuel my activism to overhaul public education before my projected earthly demise arrives at age 130 and my body lands six feet under.


Youthful epiphanies led me to permanent commitments in a life that has known diversity of experiences driven by a unifying theme.

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